DVR User Permissions / Usage Question

General Discussions Plex Features
1

Hi all,

I did a fair amount of googling but couldn’t find anything here or elsewhere that directly answered this question. My question is about the how the Plex DVR interacts with users with whom I’ve shared my media library.

Specifically, I was thinking about picking up one of the HDHomeRun Duo units and enabling the DVR functionality. However I’m a little worried about doing this because unlike the rest of my content this would be limited to two streams of live TV. I’d be doing this specifically to record a few shows I keep missing and so my girlfriend (has her own user account) can stream when she travels.

Specific questions -

  1. Are there user level controls to allow only a subset of users to access the DVR?
  2. Can you grant rights to friends (non admin user accounts - the girlfriend) to schedule recording?
  3. Is live TV transcoded before transmission? (I know that most US TV uses mpeg2 encoding, which results in some pretty large file sizes and my upstream is fairly limited 30 Mb/s - so sending raw files out could cause issues with other streams, which I’d like to avoid.)

Thanks!
Justin

2

Here’s a good place to start: https://support.plex.tv/articles/226463767-frequently-asked-questions-dvr-live-tv/

Only the primary account holder (the user the Plex DVR is logged in as) can managed the DVR. “Friends” that you share libraries with can view recorded shows from libraries they have been authorized to view remotedly, but they can’t schedule recordings or watch Live TV.

3

It makes sense that anyone who has access to the share would have access to the recorded shows, so that’s good. And it’s probably best to have scheduling tied to being the primary user.

I don’t feel like there’s a ton of clarity in the documentation about watching live TV through the DVR system - and who can / can’t access that.